e things
we've got you skinned alive over here! If you want Agriculture go to
Wisconsin! If you want Medicine, go to the Rockefeller Institute! If you
want Engineering, go to Pittsburg! But preserve still for the
English-speaking world what you alone can give! Preserve liberal
culture! Preserve the Classics! Preserve Mathematics! Preserve the
seed-ground of all practical inventions and appliances! Preserve the
integrity of the human mind!"

Interesting, is it not? These gentlemen, no doubt, were not typical
Canadians. But they were not the least intelligent men I have met on
this continent. And when they had finally landed me in my sleeping-berth
in the train, and I was left to my own reflections in that most
uncomfortable of all situations, I began to consider how odd it was that
in matters educational we are always endeavouring to reform the only
part of our system that excites the admiration of foreigners.

I do not intend, however, to plunge into that controversy. The point
that interests me is the view of my Canadian friends that in America
there is no "culture." And, in the sense they gave to that term, I think
they are right. There _is_ no culture in America. There is instruction;
there is research; there is technical and professional training; there
is specialisation in science and industry; there is every possible
application of life, to purposes and ends; but there is no life for its
own sake. Let me illustrate. It is, I have read, a maxim of American
business that "a man is damned who knows two things." "He is almost a
dilettante," it was said of a student, "he reads Dante and Shakespeare"!
"The perfect professor," said a College President, "should be willing to
work hard eleven months in the year." These are straws, if you like, but
they show the way the wind blows. Again, you will find, if you travel
long in America, that you are suffering from a kind of atrophy. You will
not, at first, realise what it means. But suddenly it will flash upon
you that you are suffering from lack of conversation. You do not
converse; you cannot; you can only talk. It is the rarest thing to meet
a man who, when a subject is started, is willing or able to follow it
out into its ramifications, to play with it, to embroider it with pathos
or with wit, to penetrate to its roots, to trace its connexions and
affinities. Question and answer, anecdote and jest are the staple of
American conversation; and, above all, information. They